In the field of automatic sorting of documents such as mail, or advertising materials, there have been several approaches to the presentation of data on said documents for use by an operator to be introduced into a data bank for later use.
Many such devices feed the documents in a horizontal fashion in an end-to-end relationship, but this type of feed mechanism requires outsized elongated work stations in order to provide adequate space for accommodation of the end-to-end sequential disposition of the documents as they parade before the operator. Attempts have been made to feed documents in a vertical sequence, but such efforts have resulted in work stations that generally became exceedingly tall. Additionally, both of these formats experienced difficulties in that a plurality of documents were often moved into the mechanism simultaneously resulting in jams. Another feature of such devices was the disposition of the document delivery trays which normally had a positive angular disposition, namely, the stack of documents were moved downwardly toward the feedrollers of the vertical feed mechanism. The positive angular disposition of the document delivery trays seriously contributed to jams at the entrance to the mechanism when the effect of gravity forced the stack of documents against the feed means at the entrance to the mechanism causing it to become inoperative when the stack became over-compressed and preventing a single document from being moved from the end of the stack into the mechanism.